Graphic Narrative Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In an article about Chris Marker's 1962 film, La Jetée, Jake Hinkson writes about the nature of memory that " the past is never as simple as we wish it to be. To return to it is to realize that we never understood it3 ". Seeing the past as a contested, confused terrain, as Hinkson suggests, is perhaps one way in which the reader can approach Kristen Radtke's Imagine Wanting Only This. With its focus on loss and the recovery of memory, Radtke's work of 'graphic non-fiction' navigates the multiple sub-genres of graphic novel, narrative, and memoir. Like most other graphic narratives, it invites the viewer-reader to look again, both in terms of time and space. This paper will seek to examine the ways in which Radtke works through the formal limitations and freedoms offered by the graphic, or 'comic' form, and her use of documents, archives, and photographic images within this form as a formal disruption4. I shall also study the implications of Radtke's decision to use photography, or photo-realistic drawn images, with relation to her work as an exploration of the past, as well as an archival project.

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter- geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities.

- by Dom Davies
- •
- Comics Studies, Comics and Graphic Novels, Refugees, Graphic Narrative
- by Christian A Bachmann
- •
- Music, Intermediality, Comics Studies, Comic Book Studies

People are witnesses ‘living in a convergence culture’, with meetings between old and new media creating new possibilities' in the contemporary culture. One of the cultures that emerged since late nineteenth century is comics. The amusement of comics seems to invite more people – young or adult – to be immersed into the world of comics. Studying visual art is an intriguing task, especially if taking underrated
subject matter from a popular visual culture media such as comics. Articulating the
expression of contemporary Malaysian comics is not a lucid task. The understanding
of the art of comics can help public awareness to go beyond the initial appreciation
of drawings and stories it contains. There is somewhat a contradiction in public
awareness of comics or cartoon. While most of Malaysians would agree that cartoons
are a valuable reflection of society, but taking it as a subject matter of a study is an arduous task since generally it was not counted as a truly significant scholarship. The lack of appreciation made the richness of local comics unseen, and as an important cultural heritage its values remains undiscovered. The researcher works pace by pace in this study; beginning with documenting to perform an initial reading/viewing of all sources and to take notes about the general ways the visually appeared in the contents of four limited, established and eligible comics’ magazines, for the time being such as Gila Gila, Ujang, Gempak, and G3, and considers to study its visual subject matter and form. The researcher then makes a categorization through the analysis of visual form by using semiotics. Finally, based on the contents of formal visual structure and semiotics visual analysis, describes the findings with some suggestion to gain insight from the point of view of the phenomenology of the arts. It is important yet meaningful to understand how comics invite its readers into its world which researcher should involve and take part as a reader by experience the reading moments as first-person perspective pre-reflectively.

- by Karna Mustaqim
- •
- Aesthetics, Comics Studies, Visual Narrative, Visual Semiotics

Projet de mémoires graphiques, visant à synthétiser en moins de 300 mots mes projets de recherche financés par le Conseil de recherche en sciences humaines du Canada (maîtrise et doctorat), présenté dans le cadre du concours pancanadien J'ai une histoire à raconter du CRSH . Cette bande dessinée articulée autour des besoins en matière de sécurité culturelle des étudiants autochtones du Canada a été sélectionnée parmi les 25 projets finalistes. Télécharger le pdf pour une meilleure appréciation du document.

In adapting Paul Auster’s postmodern detective story City of Glass as a graphic novel, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli succeeded in producing a visual translation of an often non-visual text. Focussing on Auster’s text rather than Auster’s story, it is argued, the artists make inventive use of visual metaphors, visual styles, and comic conventions to translate Auster’s words into pictures. The text’s investigation into, and interrogation of, language is brought to bear on the comic version’s own visual language, and City of Glass: The Graphic Novel emerges as valuable source material for a future poetics of comics.

- by David Coughlan
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- American Literature, Comics Studies, Comics, Contemporary Literature

Jonathan Lethem’s long-evident interest in comics, for example in his 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude, culminated in his 2008 reworking of Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’s 1976 comic book series from Marvel Comics, Omega: The Unknown. Demonstrating that Lethem’s self-conscious paraphrasing of the prior series is part of a sustained examination of repetitions and relations, this essay shows how the serial nature of comics enables Lethem to address themes of families, legacies, and communities, both in this comics work and in his earlier novel also. It will be argued that The Fortress of Solitude and Omega: The Unknown together read the repeating-but-differing images of the comic book in contrast with the repetitions of the franchised brand to present a sustained critique of capitalist cultures. In all of this, it will be seen, Lethem draws on the idioms and traits of comic books: colours, panels, word balloons, margins, gutters, lines.

- by David Coughlan
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- American Literature, Comics Studies, Comic Book Studies, Comics

Through Shaun Tan’s award-winning graphic novel The Arrival (2006), the journey and arrival into the imagined home are examined in terms of the narrative characteristics within the immigrant genre. In ‘the traditional immigrant journey’, states academic Madelaine Hron, ‘it is assumed the immigrants will eventually ‘arrive’ and successfully integrate or assimilate into their new host society’ (2009: 16). Although Tan’s work depicts the immigrant journey and success story solely via images, it ‘is far from a facile narrative about [the] immigrant experience’ (Boatright 2010: 470). In fact, the visual re-presentation is the narrative, embodying many metaphoric and silenced fears, and trauma associated with immigration. This paper examines how Tan reinterprets silenced trauma in The Arrival, and how in his wordless novel, the narrative is able to be read by first- and post-generations as a re-presentation of their own personal, familial, and cultural journeys. The paper also addresses how the immigrant’s new home has been re-presented in a ‘time and place … impregnated with a sense of unreality’ (Bachelard 1994: 58). Set in a dreamlike, imaginary ‘utopian city’ (Tan 2010: 20), the postmemorial home I argue, is one based on ‘imaginative investment, projection and creation’ (Hirsch 2008: 107). While Tan’s ‘new-world metropolis’ is shown ‘through the bewildered eyes of a newly arrived immigrant’ (Tan 2010: 20) suffering the pain of arrival, it is also a postmemorial reinterpretation of the new home that can exist for future immigrants.

In her autobiographical comic 'How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less,' Sarah Glidden depicts her travels around Israel, which she undertook as part of a Birthright Israel trip funded for young Jews in the diaspora. Using watercolors to paint her comic, she depicts two kinds of mobility: firstly, Glidden portrays her own body, and those of others, traveling to and within Israel. Secondly, Glidden's avatar Sarah moves from a place of certainty regarding the situation in Israel/Palestine to one of uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt. In this paper, I focus on how the images and the text come together to show this doubled mobility, focusing on the panel structure (including the space of the gutter), the use of watercolors, and specific affordances of the medium of comics such as fantastical elements and playing with size. In carving out the way different mobilities are navigated and negotiated in this comic, I point out one instance in which the interplay between image and text can mediate an experience of travel that is at once open, processual, and highly site-specific.

- by Sigrid Thomsen
- •
- Travel Writing, Comics Studies, Israel/Palestine, Graphic Narrative

Writing about the Holocaust means negotiating with silence and investigating the repercussions of a trauma that never stopped affecting our present. The process of historical recognition from the perspective of a third-generation artist implies the reconstruction of the past through objects, photographs and documents, written and visual evidence. Through the analysis of two contemporary German graphic novels – Love looks away(2008) by Line Hoven and Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018) by Nora Krug – this essay will identify the multiple compositional techniques and aesthetic strategies in order to understand how drawing, text and photography converge in a single effort to untangle History, either micro or macro, in order to understand what came before and after significant historical events – and perhaps even explain why those events occurred.

From 2005 to 2008, three seasons of the animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender were first broadcast on Nickelodeon. Although the show premiered on a children’s channel, its reach extended far beyond that demographic. It became a global hit and spawned a vast fandom in the United States and beyond. Among the fans were graphic novelists Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim. This chapter analyzes Yang's adaptation of the Avatar franchize to the graphic novel with a particular focus on the fan activism (including Yang's) in protest of Hollywood's adaptation Airbender (2010).

- by Tim Gruenewald
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- Critical Theory, Film Studies, Film Theory, Television Studies

You want to study comics but are uncertain about where and how to start? In this book (in comics form!) we cover some of the main aspects to take into account when reading comics. From how comics are produced and read to the various approaches to studying them. From comics traditions and genres around the world to their distribution methods. With a Further reading section and an interview with Nick Sousanis.

- by Enrique del Rey Cabero and +1
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- Comics Studies, Comic Book Studies, Comics, Comics/Sequential Art

Although the prehistory of comics in India can be traced all the way back to the 1850’s Delhi Sketchbook or the Indian Punch, the proper Indian comics scene can be said to have started from the 1960’s with the publication of Amar Chitra Katha Comics and thriving publishing houses like Raj Comics and Indrajal Comics. Since then, for the past five decades there has been a steady rise not only in the publication of comics in India, but also in its reception and appreciation. The appropriation of the term ‘graphic novel’, coined by Will Eisner, into the Indian scenario has uplifted the importance given to the comics form. Post-1980’s comics artists in India like Sarnath Banerjee, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Sarbjit Sen, Orijit Sen, Amruta Patil, Appuppen and many others have started their own endeavors instead of working for publishing houses. This along with numerous graphic anthologies in the recent years like Gaysi Zine, This Side: That Side, Longform, and many others have enlarged the scope and directions of studying comics in India. Having discussed the comics scenario, this paper talks about various ways in which the Indian comics industry is affected by the conceptual notions generated in the western world. It also raises questions about the future of comics as a genre in the Indian context and what its place may be in the upcoming researches of the Humanities departments in India.

- by Diptarup Ghosh Dastidar
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- Comics Studies, Comics, Comics/Sequential Art, Graphic Novels

The aim of this chapter is to examine the history of storytelling. This brief history includes the concept of storytelling from myths to the digital era. In the first part of the chapter, the origins of storytelling in primitive communities and its development in later periods are examined. In the second part of the chapter, the development process of digital storytelling is explained. According to this, traditional sto-rytelling has gained a new form called digital storytelling which started with a workshop in 1993 by Dana Atchley. One year later, the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) was established in Berkley, CA. The Center for Digital Storytelling has organized workshops and partnered with organizations around the world to hold projects on story facilitation, digital storytelling and other forms of digital media production and since 1993, it has helped more than 20,000 people to share their own stories. Though the digital storytelling movement started in North America, it has also spread in Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa and South America. The movement has found a place in the world of today.

In this paper I look at four examples of Bengali SF (science fiction) comics by two great authors and illustrators of sequential art: Mayukh Chaudhuri (Yātrī, Smārak) and Narayan Debnath (Ḍrāgoner thābā, Ajānā deśe). Departing from a conventional understanding of SF as a fixed genre, I aim at showing that the SF comic is a 'mode' rather than a 'genre', building on a very fluid notion of boundaries between narrative styles, themes, and tropes formally associated with fixed genres. In these Bengali comics, it is especially the visual space of the comic that allows for blending and 'contamination' with other typical features drawn from adventure and detective fiction. Moreover, a dominant thematic thread that cross-cuts the narratives here examined are the tropes of the 'other' and the 'unknown', which are in fact central images of both adventure and SF: the exploration and encounter with 'unknown' (ajānā) worlds and 'strange' species (adbhut jāti) is mirrored in the usage of a language that expresses 'otherness' and strangeness. These examples show that the medium of the comic framing the SF story adds further possibilities of reading 'genre hybridity' as constitutive of the genre of SF as such.

- by Daniela Cappello
- •
- Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, Genre, South Asian Studies

This is an interview with comics artist Ellen Forney, author of Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir and Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life. In the interview, Forney reflects on her personal experience with bipolar disorder and its representation in the comics medium. The interview also presents recent trends in graphic medicine (intersection of comics and health) and the role and use of visual metaphors in delineating mental illness experiences, through examples drawn from Forney’s own work.

- by Sathyaraj Venkatesan and +1
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- Mental Health, Mental Health nursing, Community-Based Mental Health Services, Comics Studies

Developed for an interdisciplinary DH project, the Graphic Narrative Corpus (GNC) is the first digital corpus of graphic novels, memoirs, and non-fiction written in English. It currently includes 160 book-length titles and will grow to around 250 graphic narratives by 2018. In contrast to collections such as Manga109, the eBDtheque, and the Iyyer corpus, the GNC was conceived to serve both the research needs of humanities and social science scholars and as a data set for computational analysis. The GNC was constructed as a stratified monitor corpus that balances different historical periods, geographical origin, literary genres, and the gender and ethnic background of authors. Information about the corpus and sample visualizations can be found at: https://groups.uni-paderborn.de/graphic-literature/gncorpus/corpus.php.

- by Dr. Alexander Dunst and +1
- •
- Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities), Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Digital Humanities

Cultures around the world are replete with images of women as the epitome of love, kindness, patience, and similar virtues, owing to their ability to give birth. Consequently, those who cannot give birth due to medical conditions are stig-matized and made to feel inadequate and deviant. Although infertility is a gender-neutral health predicament, it is women who encounter severe abjuration. Cultural scripts that glorify childbearing and stigmatize infertility impact the afflicted adversely as they destabilize their identity and aggravate their suffering as a patient. Graphic medical narratives on infertility, such as Paula Knight's The Facts of Life (2017), Emily Steinberg's Broken Eggs (2014), and Phoebe Potts's Good Eggs (2010), reflect on these issues and, in the process, illuminate how infertility fractures women's identity in a pronatalist society. This essay explores three graphic pathographies on infertility through three major themes: pronatalism and the social construction of motherhood, the absolutism of science, and alternatives to motherhood. The essay argues that the use of comics and graphic medicine, by combining visual and conceptual modes, presents the social, personal, and medical features of infertility with new force and urgency.

- by Sathyaraj Venkatesan and +1
- •
- American Literature, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Gender Studies

This article aims to theorise the human experiences of time during the lockdown (in the first phase of the pandemic) and the COVID-19 pandemic through the verbo-visual exposition of graphic medicine that combines the medium of comics and healthcare. The event of the pandemic has not only bifurcated our perception of time in terms of a 'before' and an 'after' but also complicated our awareness and experience of time. Put differently, an epochal transformation caused by pandemics has shifted our temporal experience from the calendar/clock time to a queer time situated outside of formal time-related constructions. The pandemic also implies a dismantling and rearranging of the fundamental structures of time within which human beings interacted with the world. Such a discontinuity in the linear trajectory of chronological time engenders an epistemic and ontological reconfiguration of the very sense of time itself. Through a phenomenological close reading of various sequential comics, single panelled images and graphic medical narratives, this article investigates how visual narratives in the form of comics communicate the passage of time. Categorically speaking, pandemic graphic narratives on time draw attention to stagnation, repetition, acceleration, loss of referentiality and the queerness (strangeness) of pandemic time. The article argues that a shift in the perception of time precipitates an altered spatiotemporal awareness that informs postpandemic discourses and power structures.

- by Sathyaraj Venkatesan
- •
- Cultural Studies, Health Sciences, Medical Humanities, Comics
- by Paolo Simonetti
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- Comics Studies, Comics, Comics/Sequential Art, Graphic Novels

Affordances, in the context of comics, connote to the general attributes of the medium such as temporality, spatiality, gestures, tone/handwriting and economy. Although comics evinces a dynamic relationship among these elements, it is possible to delineate functional and rhetorical role of these affordances on a conceptual and technical level. Taking these cues, the paper after briefly reviewing the definition and scope of graphic medicine aims to demonstrate the functional and rhetorical role of the aforementioned affordances in communicating illness and illness related experiences. Among other issues this article also seeks to address the following: how do comics engage in the visual and verbal translation of the experiences of chronic illness? how do affordances of comics facilitate the readers' haptic experience of an author's subjective trauma? Despite its juvenile legacy, comics capacitates graphic medicine to represent physical and emotional aspects of narrating subjective illness experiences within the medium. The paper concludes that comics is a uniquely suited communicative medium as it diagrams the interiority of illness experience, and, in the process, evolves itself as a locus of tacit knowledge through its translation and mediation of emotional truths and affective states altered by illness.

- by Sathyaraj Venkatesan and +1
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- American Literature, Health Sciences, Visual Studies, Visual Culture

Masallar insan hayatının bir yansıması olarak karşımıza çıkmakta dolayısıyla toplumun ahlak kurallarını içermektedir. Bu genel geçer kurallara uymayan cadı gibi figürler, masallarda olumsuz portreler çizmektedir. Ancak zamanla değişip dönüşen edebiyat biçemlerinde “öteki” kavramının simgesi haline gelen cadının rolü de değişmiş ve yeniden yazımlarda kendisine stereotipik cadı figüründen farklı hikayeler yazılmıştır. Bu makalede bir yeniden yazım örneği olan Bill Willingham tarafından yaratılmış Fables serisindeki cadı figürüne değinilecektir. Willingham sözlü kültürdeki masalların stereotipik karakterlerini Fables serisinde tamamen değiştirmiş ve madalyonun öteki yüzünü gösterip karakterlerin kısır döngüsünü bozmuştur. Buradan hareketle Fables serisindeki cadı figürüne de kötülüğün somutlaşmış halinden başka bir rol biçilmiş ve kendisine hikayesini anlatacak bir ses verilmiştir. Böylece okuyucu kanon edebiyatındaki cadıdan farklı bir kadın figürünü tanımıştır.

- by Monograf Journal
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- Literature, Literary Criticism, Stereotypes, Literary Theory

A graphic narrative set in the hills of Nagaland, from Northeast India where experiences of the pandemic are interwoven with supernatural encounters, as seen through the lens of an indigenous Ao Naga woman travelling from the urban metro city back to her roots in Nagaland. Her story is the story of many, and will hopefully find resonance with the readers here. This narrative has been fictionalized and scripted by Talilula and illustrated by Moa Lemtur.

- by Talilula Longchar
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- Mythology And Folklore, Folklore, Illustration, Folk legends
- by Anna Madill
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- Gender Studies, Sex and Gender, Women's Studies, Women's History

The figure of the doctor has always been surrounded by a heroic aura, warranted by the possession of hard-earned medical
knowledge and the tenacious reliance on doctors’ ability to heal and emancipate from pain and suffering. However, recent
literary and visual-cultural representations of doctors have unsettled the dominant and homogenized perception of physicians
as heroes. Particularly, representations in mainstream books, popular media, and comics, which have predominantly offered
unilaterally positive initial portrayals of doctors as superhuman figures, eventually provided people with more nuanced and
realistic representations, disclosing the “undesirable and unprofessional attitudes” of physicians and their sufferings. Ian
Williams’ graphic narratives The Bad Doctor (2014, Oxford: Myriad Editions) and The Lady Doctor (2019, Oxford: Myriad
Editions) serve as a critical lens to reflect on the postmodern perspective of doctor as a “wounded healer” and illuminate the
problematic view of physicians as heroes. Drawing instances from the aforementioned graphic narratives, this essay aims to
provide a revisionary understanding of physicians from heroes to victims of larger-than-life forces such as bureaucracy and the
demands of patients. The essay scrutinizes how the verbal-visual medium of comics facilitates the envisioning and enunciating
of the troubled personal and professional lives of physicians and the complexities involved in the medical profession.

- by Sathyaraj Venkatesan and +1
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- Health Sciences, History of Medicine, Comics Studies, Public Health Policy
- by Raphaël Baroni
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- Comics Studies, Comics, Comics/Sequential Art, Graphic Novels
- by Martha Kuhlman and +4
- •
- European Studies, Comics and Graphic Novels, Graphic Narrative, Central and Eastern Europe

This is a special issue of European Comic Art, guest edited by Hugo Frey and Laurike in 't Veld, focusing on the relationship between comics and fine art. There is much to gain from reading fine art and graphic narrative in conjunction with each other and this collection of articles offers essential jumping-off points in the development of our knowledge of each of the fields.

- by Laurike in 't Veld
- •
- Art History, Contemporary Art, Comics Studies, Comics/Sequential Art

By placing comics in a lively dialogue with contemporary narrative theory, The Narratology of Comic Art builds a systematic theory of narrative comics, going beyond the typical focus on the Anglophone tradition. This involves not just the exploration of those properties in comics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in narratological concepts and analytical procedures that has hitherto been overlooked. This research monograph is, then, not an application of narratology in the medium and art of comics, but a revision of narratological concepts and approaches through the study of narrative comics. Thus, while narratology is brought to bear on comics, equally comics are brought to bear on narratology.
For open access, please see
https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/312423
or
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/39883

- by Kai Mikkonen
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- Word and Image Studies, Comics Studies, Narratology, Graphic Novels

Gracias al creciente interés académico por el cómic y la novela gráfica, algunos autores como Roger Sabin o Santiago García han llamado la atención sobre el paren- tesco que estos géneros modernos de narración gráfica comparten con las hojas volanderas que, durante la Baja Edad Media y el Renacimiento, referían vidas de santos, escenas populares, alegorías místicas o pasajes bíblicos mediante secuencias de viñetas. En su monumental obra The History of Comic Strip, David Kunzle reunió el pri- mer y hasta el momento único corpus de este tipo de gra- bados, a los que denominó “tiras narrativas”, dejando pendiente la tarea de analizar sus características forma- les; tarea a la que nos proponemos dar comienzo en este artículo con el fin de establecer un puente de diálogo entre la narración gráfica y la historia del arte.

- by Roberto Bartual
- •
- Comics Studies, Comics, Comics/Sequential Art, Manuscripts (Medieval Studies)

This paper looks at several examples of experimentation on comics-storytelling, which are results of various comics-courses at Malmö University, where a combination of comics-theory and practice is mandatory. All examples use the particularity of sequencing images as their starting points but continue into quite different areas. While the options available in digital materials are attracting most attention, others focus on expanding on the conventions of printed sequential storytelling.

- by Jakob F . Dittmar
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- Comics Studies, Comics/Sequential Art, Graphic Narrative, Digital Comics

Die Musik hat den Comic erfunden! – so könnte man es angesichts der Fülle bildlicher Darstellungen von Musik sehr überspitzt formulieren.
Anhand zahlreicher Beispiele, die aus einem Korpus von über 1000 Karikaturen, Bildergeschichten und Comics ausgewählt wurden, folgt dieses Buch einigen wenigen Fluchtlinien, um nicht nur aufzuzeigen, welche Rolle die Darstellung von Musik und Musikern, von Lärm und Lärmenden für die Entwicklung des Erzählens mit Bildern hat, sondern auch, wie die in Europa erfundenen Techniken der zeichnerischen Inszenierung von Klängen in die USA kamen und dort ihre Fortsetzung im Comic fanden.
Im Zentrum steht dabei der Virtuose: Von historischen Ausnahmebegabungen wie Franz Liszt, Sigismund Thalberg, Niccolò Paganini und Hector Berlioz ausgehend, bildet er sich seit den 1830er Jahren als stereotype Figur heraus, deren bekanntester Auftritt fraglos jener in Wilhelm Buschs Bildergeschichte Virtuos (Ein Neujahrsconcert) von 1865 ist. Doch Busch konnte bereits auf eine lange Tradition bauen, der er sich seinerseits in virtuoser Weise bedient.
Die bekanntesten Künstler ihrer Zeit haben sich vor und nach Busch mit der Musik in vielfältiger Weise auseinandergesetzt – darunter William Hogarth, Grandville, Caran d’Ache, Adolf Oberländer, Hans Schließmann, Ebenezer Landells, Lothar Meggendorfer, Richard F. Outcault, Fredrick Burr Opper und Rudolph Dirks. Die Spuren ihrer Ideen und der von ihnen entwickelten Techniken lassen sich bis zum heutigen Tage verfolgen.

- by Christian A Bachmann
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- Visual Studies, Caricature (Visual Studies), Comics Studies, Comics

Increasing reliance on statistics for treatment and clinical risk assessment not only leads to the reductive interpretation of disease but also obscures ambiguities, distrust, and profound emotions that are important parts of a patient's lived experience of illness and that should be regarded as clinically and ethically relevant. Enabling critique of the limitations of statistics and illustrating their hegemonic impact on the patient's experience of illness, graphic medicine emerges as a democratic platform where marginalized perspectives on illness experiences are vindicated. Through a close reading of two carer narratives, Mom's Cancer (2006) and Janet & Me: An Illustrated Story of Love and Loss (2004), we illustrate how graphic pathographies represent experiential features of illness that are obscured by overreliance on statistical data. Statistics in Clinics and Comics " Your survival rate is 10%! " the oncologist pronounced after a quick glance at the pathology report of our friend. Although the physician was objectively stating our friend's chances of survival, it had a paralyzing impact on us. Five years has passed since his diagnosis of lung cancer; today, our friend is a successful entrepreneur and a motivational speaker inspiring thousands of cancer patients with his survival saga. In retrospect, the physician's statistical assertion inspired dread in him and all those who were close to him each day. Today, we are relieved that reality was far different from those figures. It was during this span of 5 years of uncertainty that we came across a website called graphicmedicine.org as well as numerous other online sources about illness and survival. The website featured several comics that boldly explored those aspects of illness and health care that physicians and the medical system at large don't convey to patients. The increasing reliance on and ritualistic use of medical statistics for treatment, risk assessment, and other related purposes not only leads to the reductive interpretation of disease but also obscures the ambiguities, distrust, fear, and profound emotions that are important aspects of a patient's lived experience of illness. In Illness as Narrative, Ann Jurecic characterizes such a chasm as " a fundamental incompatibility " 1 between personal experience of illness and statistically mediated measurement. Through critiquing and

- by Sathyaraj Venkatesan and +1
- •
- American Literature, Cultural Studies, Health Sciences, Ethics
- by Kyle A Hammonds
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- Cultural Studies, Narrative, Comics Studies, Comics
- by Emma Louise Pudge
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- Comics Studies, Narrative Medicine, Medical Humanities, Comics